Gaza
Killing the Witnesses
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
The rest of the blog
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
Jenrick’s “medieval attitudes” line isn’t about protecting women — it’s about importing the far right’s script into the Tory mainstream. From Powell to Farage, the cast has changed but the grammar is the same: the outsider as danger, the nation as victim, the politician as saviour.
Keir Starmer’s proscription of Palestine Action marks a new stage in Britain’s authoritarian turn, retooling counter-terrorism laws to criminalise dissent, define solidarity as “terrorism”, and dress up political repression as public safety.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.
Right to Buy was never just a housing policy. It was a weapon. It stripped councils of their power, turned tenants into property owners, and recast collective provision as individual gain. The result wasn’t freedom but fragmentation: social housing gutted, rents soaring, and the right to strike undermined by the threat of eviction. Thatcher didn’t just sell homes. She sold a new class alignment, and we’re still living in its ruins.
In 1984, we built a nuclear bunker out of cardboard boxes in the corner of our classroom. Each of us brought something for survival—Look-In mags, tins of beans, but no tin opener. Even as kids, we knew it was useless. That was the point. You couldn’t market nuclear war as survivable. Forty years on, the language has changed but the logic remains. The bomb hasn’t gone away, it’s just become background noise. The treaties are gone. The madmen are in charge. And the system that built the bomb still holds it, not to use necessarily, but to remind us who gets to decide if we live.
The modern-day barons don’t run trade unions, they sail £100 million yachts and bankroll governments. Yet it’s the rail cleaner or the guard who’s cast as the threat. What’s truly appalling is not that Eddie Dempsey wants to strike fast, but that workers can’t strike in solidarity with Palestinians, can’t refuse to load weapons bound for Gaza, can’t use their collective strength to win better conditions across sectors. The right fears not chaos—but class power.
Trump promised to protect the safety net. Instead, he signed a law that slashes Medicaid, imposes work requirements, and purges the rolls by design. His supporters still cheer, not because the cuts help them, but because the performance does. The cap says “Make America Great Again.” The policy says: you’re on your own.
Trump hasn’t changed, he’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals. It’s Dugin who’s panicking. The fantasy’s collapsing, so he calls it a globalist takeover. The world isn’t ending. Just his script.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.
At The Hague summit, NATO committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence and security by 2035—a figure with no strategic rationale and every sign of submission to Donald Trump. Only Spain said no. Pedro Sánchez broke ranks, arguing that gutting public services to fund rearmament was neither economically justifiable nor politically defensible. In doing so, he exposed what the rest of Europe won’t admit: this isn’t about defence. It’s about deference. And someone had to refuse.
Trump’s bunker busters, Netanyahu’s theological realism, and Starmer’s threat to criminalise Palestine Action reveal a world in which violence is moralised, empire is rationalised, and dissent is once again labelled terrorism.
As Trump ramps up pressure on Iran—economically, militarily, and rhetorically—he discards intelligence briefings in favour of bombast, demands a surrender he can’t define, and courts catastrophe under the banner of strategic clarity. But Iran is not Iraq, and the fantasy of collapse may end in flames, not order.
Regime Collapse, Revolution—or Something Worse?
Trump’s second term marries ICE raids at home with a war machine primed abroad, and Iran, once again, plays the designated enemy.
Trump doesn’t lie to persuade—he lies to dominate, using contradiction as a weapon to break truth itself.
They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.
